The Republican presidential contest is the least consequential drama on the Badger State's crowded political scene these days.

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As Mitt Romney continues his joyless death march to the GOP presidential nomination, Tuesday's primary in Wisconsin presents the latest ostensible turningpoint. There are also delegate-awarding primaries in Washington, D.C., and Maryland, but it's Wisconsin that marks the latest this-could-be-it-folks showdown of heartland conservative voters -- you know, just like Illinois a couple of weeks ago, or Ohio on Super Tuesday, or Michigan back on Feb. 28. Once again, Romney is favored to win but vulnerable to surprise, and neither a close win nor a close loss would likely have the power to either a) drive out his determined rivals or b) alter the mathematical near-inevitability of a Romney nomination. They've all been turning points -- it's just that, turn after turn, the primary keeps on going, like the Indy 500.

Meanwhile, Wisconsin is a hotbed of fascinating political stories -- the primary just isn't one of them. Here are five things happening in Wisconsin politics more interesting than the Republican primary -- plus one more bit of big news in the state.

1. The Walker recall. After a year of turmoil and acrimony following his successful effort to jam public-worker bargaining reforms through the state legislature, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker faces a recall election. On Friday, the date was set for June 5 by a state board. The recall has roiled the political landscape of what was previously a more or less normal swing state, mobilizing liberals and public workers by the thousands -- the volunteer signature-gatherers collected a million anti-Walker petitions for the recall drive -- even as Walker has become a hero to the national conservative movement. Now, as the candidates campaign for the hearts of the state's GOP electorate, which is strongly on Walker's side, Romney and Santorum have expressed strong support for his initiatives. The early-summer election stands to be expensive, hard-fought and bruisingly negative -- a crucial preview of the November presidential stakes as well as a referendum on Walker's brand of hard-charging Tea Party conservatism. Three Republican state senators also face recalls; Democrats netted two seats in the state senate during a first wave of recalls last year, one short of taking the majority.

2. The Democratic gubernatorial primary. Last week, Walker's 2010 opponent, Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, announced his candidacy for the recall race. (Under Wisconsin law, a recall is a fully contested election with challengers, not a mere yes-or-no referendum on the recalled official; the Democratic candidates will face off in a May 8 primary.) As divisive as Walker has proven to be, the field of Democratic candidates against him includes no clear standout for progressives to rally around. Kathleen Falk, a former county executive, was considered the favorite before Barrett got in and is supported by major unions, who don't see Barrett as a champion. But now liberals face a potentially wrenching choice between the true-blue liberal who embodies the labor spirit animating the anti-Walker push (Falk) and a better-known but less ideological choice who might give them a better chance of winning (Barrett).

3. The court blow to Walker's anti-collective bargaining law. Walker's attempt to rein in collective bargaining suffered a setback last week when a federal court struck down some key parts of the legislation, ruling that the fact that Walker exempted police and fire unions -- a move his critics saw as a politically expedient attempt to keep public-safety workers in his corner -- made the measure a violation of equal protection.

4. The embezzlement investigation of former Walker staffers. It began as a relatively routine investigation by the Milwaukee district attorney into whether staffers conducted campaign business on government time during Walker's time as county executive, prior to being elected governor. But it has deepened into a probe of former staffers with ties to Walker on serious charges including embezzlement. Waker hasn't been implicated thus far in the closely held, grand jury-like investigation, but the taint of potential misconduct has contributed to increasing public skepticism of the controversial governor.

5. On top of all that, an abortion-clinic bombing. On Sunday night, an explosive device went off outside a Planned Parenthood clinic in Grand Chute, Wisconsin. The chemical-filled plastic bottle caused minor structural damage and no injuries. Social issues haven't been the focus of any of Wisconsin's many political fights, but the shocking incident served as a reminder of the seriousness of the issues at hand.

6. Bonus story: Midwest Airlines cancels cookies. With all this political drama roiling the atmosphere, the No. 1 story on the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's website Monday was still bigger news: Milwaukee-based Midwest Airlines plans to stop serving hot chocolate-chip cookies on all its flights.

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The revolutionary ideals of Black Panther’s profound and complex villain have been twisted into a desire for hegemony.

The following article contains major spoilers.

Black Panther is a love letter to people of African descent all over the world. Its actors, its costume design, its music, and countless other facets of the film are drawn from all over the continent and its diaspora, in a science-fiction celebration of the imaginary country of Wakanda, a high-tech utopia that is a fictive manifestation of African potential unfettered by slavery and colonialism.

But it is first and foremost an African American love letter, and as such it is consumed with The Void, the psychic and cultural wound caused by the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, the loss of life, culture, language, and history that could never be restored. It is the attempt to penetrate The Void that brought us Alex Haley’s Roots, that draws thousands of African Americans across the ocean to visit West Africa every year, that left me crumpled on the rocks outside the Door of No Return at Gorée Island’s slave house as I stared out over a horizon that my ancestors might have traversed once and forever. Because all they have was lost to The Void, I can never know who they were, and neither can anyone else.

In Cyprus, Estonia, the United Arab Emirates, and elsewhere, passports can now be bought and sold.

“If you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere. You don’t understand what citizenship means,” the British prime minister, Theresa May, declared in October 2016. Not long after, at his first postelection rally, Donald Trump asserted, “There is no global anthem. No global currency. No certificate of global citizenship. We pledge allegiance to one flag and that flag is the American flag.” And in Hungary, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has increased his national-conservative party’s popularity with statements like “all the terrorists are basically migrants” and “the best migrant is the migrant who does not come.”

Citizenship and its varying legal definition has become one of the key battlegrounds of the 21st century, as nations attempt to stake out their power in a G-Zero, globalized world, one increasingly defined by transnational, borderless trade and liquid, virtual finance. In a climate of pervasive nationalism, jingoism, xenophobia, and ever-building resentment toward those who move, it’s tempting to think that doing so would become more difficult. But alongside the rise of populist, identitarian movements across the globe, identity itself is being virtualized, too. It no longer needs to be tied to place or nation to function in the global marketplace.

Deputy Attorney General Ron Rosenstein flew to Seattle for a press conference at which he announced little, but may have said a great deal.

Back in the fall of 2001, exactly one month after the 9/11 attacks, a lawyer in Seattle named Tom Wales was murdered as he worked alone at his home computer at night. Someone walked into the yard of Wales’s house in the Queen Anne Hill neighborhood of Seattle, careful to avoid sensors that would have set off flood lights in the yard, and fired several times through a basement window, hitting Wales as he sat at his desk. Wales survived long enough to make a call to 911 and died soon afterwards. He was 49, divorced, with two children in their 20s.

The crime was huge and dismaying news in Seattle, where Wales was a prominent, respected, and widely liked figure. As a young lawyer in the early 1980s he had left a potentially lucrative path with a New York law firm to come to Seattle and work as an assistant U.S. attorney, or federal prosecutor. That role, which he was still performing at the time of his death, mainly involved prosecuting fraud cases. In his off-duty hours, Wales had become a prominent gun-control advocate. From the time of his death onward, the circumstances of the killing—deliberate, planned, nothing like a robbery or a random tragedy—and the prominence of his official crime-fighting record and unofficial advocacy role led to widespread assumption that his death was a retaliatory “hit.” The Justice Department considers him the first and only U.S. prosecutor to have been killed in the line of duty.

A week after 17 people were murdered in a mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, teenagers across South Florida, in areas near Washington, D.C., and in other parts of the United States walked out of their classrooms to stage protests against the horror of school shootings and to advocate for gun law reforms.

A week after 17 people were murdered in a mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, teenagers across South Florida, in areas near Washington, D.C., and in other parts of the United States walked out of their classrooms to stage protests against the horror of school shootings and to advocate for gun law reforms. Student survivors of the attack at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School traveled to their state Capitol to attend a rally, meet with legislators, and urge them to do anything they can to make their lives safer. These teenagers are speaking clearly for themselves on social media, speaking loudly to the media, and they are speaking straight to those in power—challenging lawmakers to end the bloodshed with their “#NeverAgain” movement.

Why the ingrained expectation that women should desire to become parents is unhealthy

In 2008, Nebraska decriminalized child abandonment. The move was part of a “safe haven” law designed to address increased rates of infanticide in the state. Like other safe-haven laws, parents in Nebraska who felt unprepared to care for their babies could drop them off in a designated location without fear of arrest and prosecution. But legislators made a major logistical error: They failed to implement an age limitation for dropped-off children.

Within just weeks of the law passing, parents started dropping off their kids. But here's the rub: None of them were infants. A couple of months in, 36 children had been left in state hospitals and police stations. Twenty-two of the children were over 13 years old. A 51-year-old grandmother dropped off a 12-year-old boy. One father dropped off his entire family—nine children from ages one to 17. Others drove from neighboring states to drop off their children once they heard that they could abandon them without repercussion.

Here are some readers with extra elements on this discussion—political, cultural, international. First, an American reader on the interaction of current concepts of masculinity and the nearly all-male population of mass gun murderers:

The path to its revival lies in self-sacrifice, and in placing collective interests ahead of the narrowly personal.

The death of liberalism constitutes the publishing world’s biggest mass funeral since the death of God half a century ago. Some authors, like conservative philosopher Patrick Deneen, of Why Liberalism Failed, have come to bury yesterday’s dogma. Others, like Edward Luce (The Retreat of Western Liberalism), Mark Lilla (The Once and Future Liberal), and Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt (How Democracies Die) come rather to praise. I’m in the latter group; the title-in-my-head of the book I’m now writing is What Was Liberalism.

But perhaps, like God, liberalism has been buried prematurely. Maybe the question that we should be asking is not what killed liberalism, but rather, what can we learn from liberalism’s long story of persistence—and how can we apply those insights in order to help liberalism write a new story for our own time.

A new study explores a strange paradox: In countries that empower women, they are less likely to choose math and science professions.

Though their numbers are growing, only 27 percent of all students taking the AP Computer Science exam in the United States are female. The gender gap only grows worse from there: Just 18 percent of American computer-science college degrees go to women. This is in the United States, where many college men proudly describe themselves as “male feminists” and girls are taught they can be anything they want to be.

Meanwhile, in Algeria, 41 percent of college graduates in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and math—or “STEM,” as it’s known—are female. There, employment discrimination against women is rife and women are often pressured to make amends with their abusive husbands.

According to a report I covered a few years ago, Jordan, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates were the only three countries in which boys are significantly less likely to feel comfortable working on math problems than girls are. In all of the other nations surveyed, girls were more likely to say they feel “helpless while performing a math problem.”

The president’s son is selling luxury condos and making a foreign-policy speech.

Who does Donald Trump Jr. speak for?

Does the president’s son speak for the Trump Organization as he promotes luxury apartments in India? Does he speak for himself when he dines with investors in the projects? Does he speak for the Trump administration as he makes a foreign-policy speech in Mumbai on Friday?

“When these sons go around all over the world talking about, one, Trump business deals and, two, … apparently giving speeches on some United States government foreign policy, they are strongly suggesting a linkage between the two,” Richard Painter, President George W. Bush’s chief ethics lawyer who is a professor of law at the University of Minnesota, told me. “Somebody, somewhere is going to cross the line into suggesting a quid pro quo.”